Chasing a comet from Earth – update on the professional observing campaign

An interview with Colin Snodgrass of the Open University, UK, who coordinates a consortium of professional astronomers observing Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Earth in support of the Rosetta mission. Q: Rosetta has been 'living' with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for almost a year now. How was this year from the perspective of the professional astronomers observing the comet with telescopes on Earth? A: It has been a very exciting year for everyone in comet science, following the results from Rosetta, but thankfully the ground-based view of 67P didn’t get too exciting yet – the comet largely followed our predictions in terms of its total brightness, which is reassuring as it allows us to have confidence in our plans for observing (and for Rosetta). We watched the comet grow from a single dot to show a clear comet-like shape in 2014, and then had a relatively long winter where we couldn’t observe the comet (between November and April). Now that the comet is back within reach of our telescopes, it is an even more impressive sight, with a long tail visible in deeper images. Recently, as the comet is approaching perihelion, it is much more active. We can now study the gasses and large-scale dust jets in the coma from ground-based observations. Q: How many observatories were involved and how often have they observed the comet? A: In 2014, the comet was still relatively faint, with a magnitude of around 20, approximately 400,000 times fainter than the naked eye can detect, so most of the observations were performed with some of the biggest telescopes available on the ground: the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy's Gemini South telescope, both located in Chile. Other observatories were also used, including the TRAPPIST comet-chasing telescope, also in Chile, […]

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